Vendor Printer Profiles

One of the major frustrations in printing your own photographs is getting predictable color. It’s heartbreaking to spend hours tweaking your photograph so that it looks just so, then print it out only to get a horrible result. Color casts, sunburnt skin, and worse can happen. The standard answer from the printing pros for dealing with this is to, “just use a color-managed workflow.” The promise is that if you have a calibrated and profiled display and use an ICC profile for the combination of printer and paper you are using, all will be perfect. Or, at least predictable.

Unfortunately, you can calibrate and profile your display, think that you’ve conquered the problem, and then still end up with horrible results. You don’t see just the bit of difference between your monitor being a transmissive device and prints being reflective. No, you still see horrible color casts and your Aunt Bettie is so green, she looks downright ill. Then, you try a different paper and get a completely different set of results. Now your Aunt looks like she spent too much time at the beach. At this point, it’s tempting to think that all those people talking about color management are full of crap. The promise of consistency sounds like hogwash. It’s tempting to just to toss everything out the window and go back to shooting with film and let the lab handle the color problems.

A series of test prints on different papers sitting on top of an Epson 4800.

Here’s the deal. Seven or eight times out of ten, at a guess, the problem at this point isn’t with you or your monitor’s calibration. It’s probably not with your printer either, per se. The problem is likely in your printer profiles—typically the ones that your printer vendor gave you. For whatever reason, the bulk of the vendor paper profiles, especially for their mainline paper lines, tend to be crap and don’t give good results.

In the old days of inkjet printing—just a few years ago, mind you—this was at least a bit more understandable. The unit-to-unit variation in printers of the same model was fairly significant and made it impossible to provide a one-size-fits-all profile for any particular combination of printer and paper. The vendors shipped profiles for their papers that attempted to get close, for some definition of close. If you were lucky, you’d do OK. If not, well, too bad. Most modern printers, on the other hand, ship from the factory in a fairly well linearized state. This means that if you give the same data to two different printers of the same model, you’ll get about the same printed result, all other things being equal. Some printers, such as the Epson Stylus Pro series, are given extra special love at the factory to ensure they are linearized. Others, such as the HP B9180, can linearize themselves on demand. All in all, things are in a much better state than they used to be.

The improvement in printer linearization is great. But without a good profile, it isn’t enough to get the job done. The frustrating part is that it doesn’t have to be this way. It can be better. It should be better. And, if you can get good profiles from your paper vendor, it is better.

I saw how good it can be this weekend while experimenting with a bunch of different papers on the Epson 4800 I have on loan from Printerville. I’ve experimented quite a bit with different papers before, but usually only one or two at a time. This time, I worked through a sample box from Red River.

For all the papers, I downloaded the vendor’s profiles for the Epson 4800—made for Red River by Chromix—and printed out sample images, including the classic Photodisc sample image with the four kids. The results are quite nice indeed. Across the six Red River papers I printed—Arctic Polar Satin, Premium Polar Satin, Arctic Polar Luster, Arctic Polar Gloss, Ultrapro Gloss 2.0, and Ultrapro Satin 2.0—the vendor profiles gave a remarkable consistency of color. The only significant differences in the output’s color quality was, to my eye, a result of the color tone and finish characteristics of the paper. The rest of the differences were really too minor to quibble about and a preference for any of the papers can be formed based on the weight and surface characteristics of the papers, not the color performance. The way it should be.

To break out of comparing profiles from just one vendor, I proceeded to make a few more prints with Epson’s Exhibition Fiber Paper and Ilford’s Gallerie Gold Fibre Silk. For the Epson Fiber paper, I used the Pixel Genius profile. For the Gallerie Gold Fibre Silk paper, I used the profile provided by Ilford. Both of these profiles gave great results with the papers, and were entirely consistent color-wise with the prints on the Red River papers. It was a great demonstration that color management does work, and it’s one that I wish I more people could see firsthand without investing lots of money in different papers.

Just for fun, I decided to pull out a pack of Epson Photo Glossy Paper. The same sort of stuff most people would likely run a check print with in their letter or tabloid size printer. You’d think that Epson paper on an Epson printer should give decent results, right? Turns out, it was the worst print of the night, color wise. The reds were so harsh that the kids looked a bit sunburned. It was a sad sight to see. After all, shouldn’t the profile from the printer manufacturer do a better job? Even on lower-end paper?

So what’s the moral of the story? How do you know you have a good profile? That’s a good question. At this point, without some sort of “gold seal of approval” authority, it’s simply a matter of trying things out. But, if you’ve ever struggled with color management and your printer before, you should know that consistency is possible. Just don’t look for your printer vendor to necessarily provide it for you with their mainstream papers.